Medieval Literature

Catalog description

This course surveys the literary production in Europe covering over a thousand years of cultural and literary evolution. It invites readers to explore medieval quests in their various manifestations in order to understand the medieval relationship to nature, community, and the foreign. Medieval readers had a keen interest in the nature of the world—places both near and far—and were avid consumers of talesof distant places and people. Their literature was at the heart of the creation of visions of natural and human diversity. Representative works examined may include The Alexander Romance, The Travels of Marco Polo, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Mandeville's Book of Travels, Gower's Confessio Amantis, the only surviving autobiography of a female visionary, The Book of Margery Kempe, select romances from the celebrated Lays of Marie de France and Christine and Pizan, and anonymous satirical, and mystical plays from Medieval Greek and Arabic sources in translation.